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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 4570217" data-attributes="member: 27780">Dragon Issue 61: May 1982part 1/284 pagesIn this issue: Dragon Rumbles: Oh dear. SPI is in trouble. TSR is buying them out. Jake also comments on the purchase of AMAZING magazine. Looks like they're expanding their properties in more ways than one. But can they make any profit out of these, or will it just be throwing good money after bad? I'm sure we'll get more news on this as it happens. Out on a limb: A letter on Spellbinders by a rival manufacturer, refuting both their originality and their profitability. Which sucks a little. Not every experiment can be a success. A letter commenting on Jake's KILLER editorials. Yeah. People ought to try and avoid doing things that give roleplaying a bad name, particularly when they involve bystanders. Avoiding the worried parent brigade is a good idea. Another letter engaging in archery quibbles, and asking for a full book devoted to weapons and optional weapon rules. Eeek. Well, I suppose it'll make some people happy. A letter asking all those people who dislike high level play, if the game wasn't intended for it, why did they give rules for it in the first place? What's wrong with playing the game until you become a god? A letter of generalized praise, apart from a few more stupid archery quibbles. A letter griping about the new cleric spells len gave us in issue 58, saying that many of them are useless to adventurers. Len quite rightly rebutts this. Not all clerics are adventurers, and even the ones that are won't neccacarily want to memorize all combat spells, all the time. Some players have in-game romances between characters and stuff, y'know, actual roleplaying. From the sorcerors scroll: Gary moves on to illusionist cantrips. This is considerably shorter than the wizard one, as illusionist spells are more versatile, but less useful in a lot of ways. This is pretty much as you'd expect it to be. I think we've exhausted this avenue of expansion for now. Giants in the earth: This month's characters with percentile ability scores where they shouldn't be are C.J Cutliffe Hyne's Deucalion, John Norman's Tarl Cabot, and Charles R Saunders' Dossouye. Nothing unusual here either. Without any weapons: Ha. Someone's unhappy with the way unarmed combat is so much more complex than armed, for less effect. So they're trying to streamline it. But it's still way more complex, especially if you don't precalculate all these modifiers. Most adventurers'll still just go for the kill, even if it might be more advantageous to subdue the enemy. That wasn't much help. Or with a weird one: And here's the other side of the coin. Funny foreign weaponry. Tiger claws, Boomerangs, bullwhips (which paladins are forbidden to use <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> ), caltrops. The mancatcher! ( now that's a far more efficient way of subduing an enemy than unarmed combat.) We'll be seeing quite a few of these again in official supplements. There is a certain amount of special effects creep here, but thankfully damage creep has been avoided. It would be bad for verisimilitude if all the indigenous cultures had better weaponry than the european analogues. (although if you're playing D&D, that should be the least of your worries) I'm sure some of you had lots of fun with these little babies. The gnomish point of view: And so we reach the last of the common PC races. Quite a bit of attention is put on their tendency to be practical jokers. This may not have been the wisest decision, in hindsight. They also hate kobolds. Apart from that, they do seem to struggle to find a strong identity, having a bit of elves nature love, dwarves skill at crafting and underground stuff, and halflings sneakiness and love of community and food. They are pretty adaptable little creatures. But that's not good enough to get them in the A list, is it. You need a proper archetype. They should have given this to Ed instead of Roger. He'd (make a plan and he'd follow through, that's what Edward Greenwood would do) have figured something out. The gods of the gnomes: And after the racial description, come the extra gods. Baervan wildwanderer, Sejolan earthcaller, Flandal Steelskin, All faced up against the crawler below, Urdlen. Well, the gnome deities are considerably more interesting than the halfling ones anyway, with their spread of portfolios,  companions, and rather distinctive evil god. They certainly serve to flesh out what gnomes are and the ingredients that go into making them better than the previous article did. But will people take in that implied setting stuff? Hard to say. Probably not enough, considering the way they've been treated in 3rd and 4th edition. Which is a shame, really.</blockquote>

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